Costa Mesa formed a homeless task force last spring and came up with a "carrot and stick approach," said Muriel Ullman, the city's housing consultant. The city hopes to build more affordable housing using federal grant money and county resources and has hired a mental health worker to connect with the chronically homeless. It has also partnered with local churches to set up a storage facility where the homeless can keep their belongings to avoid having them confiscated, Ullman said.

But Costa Mesa has also passed a slate of new ordinances, including bans on parking a bike anywhere but on a city bike rack, smoking in the park and sleeping in the park after dark, she said. The city also spent $60,000 to tear down a gazebo that attracted large numbers of homeless people, asked churches to stop soup kitchens there and hired two rangers to patrol the park.

The mayor last week stoked anger by calling soup kitchens nuisances and asking the city to investigate some decades-old charities there. Critics say that Costa Mesa is "just trying to get rid of our homeless, but what we're trying to do is help those who want help and if somebody doesn't want help — and they have refused help on numerous occasions — we want the courts to deal with them," Ullman said.

Communities throughout the sun-belt have stepped up enforcement of vagrancy and other laws in efforts to keep the homeless at bay.

Because…if you’re gonna be forced to live ‘outside’ you’d best be doing it where it’s warm (ish)

Which is not to say that homelessness is primarily a southern phenomenon, it is not. There are plenty of homeless who call the frigid north home.

Hell, I was watching Alaska State Troopers on National Geographic (a subsidiary of NewsCorp…sadly) and they were, er, complaining about the homeless population.

So it’s NOT ‘isolated’ and it’s not, er, minimal or by any means ‘temporary’.

What is causing large numbers of citizens into the streets good citizen?

I know the answer…and so do you.

And if you’re not a brain-fried conservo-whacko then you know the growing homeless problem is a symptom of the Global Race to the bottom.

Which is driven by…(can you give me an Amen?) Global Capitalism!

You heard the Mittster, those people (certainly the homeless) think they’re ‘entitled’ to live indoors and eat regularly (fucking moochers!) They believe society owes them a job that pays them a wage they can live on! (How fucking totally ridiculous is that? How would people like Mitt be able to afford homes around the world and the staff to run them if he actually had to pay people LIVING WAGES?)

Now, if that isn’t bad enough…let’s take a moment to acquaint ourselves with the ‘future’ of space exploitation (oops) exploration

The company's unmanned Falcon rocket roared into the night sky right on time, putting SpaceX on track to reach the space station Wednesday. The complex was soaring southwest of Tasmania when the Falcon took flight.

Officials declared the launch a success. In more good news, a piece of space junk was no longer threatening the station, and NASA could focus entirely on the delivery mission. NASA is counting on private business to restock the space station, now that the shuttles have retired to museums. The space agency has a $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX for 12 resupply missions.

Especially exciting for NASA is the fact that the Dragon will return twice as much cargo as it took up, including a stockpile of astronauts' blood and urine samples. The samples — nearly 500 of them — have been stashed in freezers since Atlantis made the last shuttle flight in July 2011.

The Dragon will spend close to three weeks at the space station before being released and parachuting into the Pacific at the end of October. By then, the space station should be back up to a full crew of six.

one point six BILLION buys an awful lot of cookies, don't ya think?

And then the fucking freemarket Republicans have the fucking blazing BALLS to complain about 'the deficit'!

Um, geez louise, who foots the tab for this little captive audience?

One guess and it ain’t Santa Claus, it’s You and me!

Not only did the >One Percent abandon the shuttle program but they are going to abandon NASA itself in favor of what, 5 guys in the desert with a fucking laptop?

You already know why there isn’t a ‘moonbase’

It's because the fucking greedheads couldn’t figure out how to line their pockets from the hostile environments offered by ‘near space’!

Once we figure out how to visit other solar systems (quicker than a lifetime of space travel or spending the next century in suspended animation) all of those twinkling lights up there become ‘Real Estate’…with all that entails.

The pace of Wall Street’s war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill. Having demonized public employees for being scheduled to receive pensions on their lifetime employment service, bondholders are insisting on getting the money instead. It is the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain – and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare.

Unlike the U.S. federal government, most states and cities have constitutions that prevent them from running budget deficits. This means that when they cut property taxes, they either must borrow from the wealthy, or cut back employment and public services.

For many years they borrowed, paying tax-exempt interest to wealthy bondholders. But carrying charges on these have mounted to a point where they now look risky as the economy sinks into debt deflation. Cities are defaulting from California to Alabama. They cannot reverse course and restore taxes on property owners without causing more mortgage defaults and abandonments. Something has to give – so cities are scaling back public spending, downsizing their school systems and police forces, and selling off their assets to pay bondholders.

Um, because of this {ahem} bullshit there won’t be a Real Estate Market in the future. In fact it was shit like this back when private ownership of property first became ‘lawful’ (it wasn’t always so kiddos…) that put a significant damper on Real Estate for centuries.

Worse, this whole scheme of using property taxes to fund municipal functions, it’s that sort of thing that blew up in their faces.

Which is to point out that NONE of this is ‘NEW’.

The shame of it all is that they keep on pulling it…and they keep getting away with it!

About Me

I have just perused the media offerings for today and concluded, amazingly, that in a world that is truly falling apart, they have nothing to say!

So for today’s ‘treat’, you can read me, ‘unplugged’.

Let’s start with my humble beginnings, shall we?

No I’m not going to bore you with my tawdry upbringing because being raised poor has little to do with anything…although I doubt I’d be who I am today had I been born with anything even resembling a ‘silver spoon’ protruding from any orifice!

So yes, it is at least tangentially relevant that I was born poor and remain poor to this day.

Um, contrary to popular belief, I have never set myself on a path to ‘conquer the world’…and, unsurprisingly, might be accused of failing because I didn’t’ set my sights high enough.

But we can’t ALL conquer the world…and maybe that is my fracture because my goal always has been the ‘greatest good’.

Why is it in a world so full of bounty that only a few get to enjoy it?

And the answer comes back (quite quickly I might add:) mismanagement.

The system itself is deeply flawed and remains that way due to deep corruption!

But I preach to the choir, do I not?

Everybody knows.

So why doesn’t ‘somebody’ DO SOMETHING about it?

Have we all been so deeply indoctrinated with ‘go along to get along’ that none of us dare ‘rock the boat’ (even though it is headed over a cliff?)

Although I’d daresay we have already gone over that cliff, rocking the boat now would merely remove the only thing between you and the jagged rocks below.

As thin as that object may be,

And no, it is unlikely you will survive that sudden stop that follows every long fall.

But I digress…(and do so with such frequency that I fear few of you can follow my, er, ‘insights’ to their conclusions.)

Which is to announce that I suspect my son isn’t the only one with ADD.

Meaning he comes by his ‘honestly’.

So let’s return to the beginning (because we’re gonna end up there anyway) and try not to ‘squander the opportunity’ which the slavers among us are prepared to defend with their worthless lives.

Yes good citizen, there are those among us who support slavery so long as it is not they who are the slaves.

They will inflict a fate worse than death upon YOU if their children are spared.

Did I lose you again? Try to keep up, eh?

These ‘true believers’ form a singular barrier to a fair and equitable society. They must be eliminated OR those they follow/obey must be, er, ‘eradicated’ for subsequent generations to be free.

No ‘half measures’ here good citizen, this is not a ‘once and done’ proposition.

Which is to say vigilance is key. We may succeed in sweeping them aside (temporarily) but they will regroup and start over if we provide them with the mechanisms they need to corrupt society.

Their ‘tool of choice’ is (and always will be) ‘hard currency’. Without it, it becomes near impossible to ‘bribe’ others towards your way of thinking.

This is why you are ‘trained’ to demand money you can touch…while money itself remains an ‘idea’.

Fix this and we break the slaver’s back.

The other ‘trump card’ the slaver holds is their control of the workplace. They get to decide who ‘prospers’ and who starves.

A decidedly toxic power to have in a world where survival depends on ‘participation’.

If they don’t let you play, you can’t prosper…legally.

That is the ‘powder keg’ the unemployment situation has become.

Yet the conservatives (those who would enslave you) still preach that it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to make yourself ‘USEFUL’ to the employer.

And soon SOME OF YOU may be able to ‘redeem’ yourselves by being willing to DIE for people who wouldn’t ordinarily spit on the best part of you!

Oh, you’ll be a hero for taking a bullet for them but you can almost hear them shriek ‘idiot’ as you fall to the ground, clutching your vitals!

Um, I find myself apologizing after these solo flights if only because a trip through the landscape that is my mind can be a pretty disturbing experience for those who don’t usually think along those lines.

So, in short…(not that I’m particularly comfortable with the short version of anything) A Simple Plan was designed to facilitate the ‘equality’ we need to move forward as a species.

If we don’t learn to live together, we will not survive to go forth and meet new (and hopefully more intelligent) races across the cosmos.